Archive for the ‘Open Source’ category

Daily Rumblings

June 30th, 2001

I’m sure Microsoft’s stamp of approval for BSD is very sincere, and I’m also sure it’s anattempt to frame Linux out of the picture. The Windows TCP/IP stack is built around BSD code; from Microsoft’s point of view, the BSD crowd are a bunch of suckers begging to be exploited again and again. I’m certain Microsoft would love for the entire open-source world to turn into an acquiescent source of free R&D for its monopoly. and other interesting things from ESR in this interview.

Still at Microsoft, keep your eye on the ball!

The collective book reading is paying off. I intercepted in my team discussions about refactoring. The activity itself became daily routine. Code is changing, design is improving, I’m happy!

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Posted in Noise, Open Source

Daily Rumblings

May 14th, 2001

Eazel, a company in which many (including myself) has put their hopes to improve Linux GUI and usability is going down. Unfortunately not many Linux companies remaining, I’m wandering when Ximian is going to close their gates.

Even if the unfortunate dot.com bang wouldn’t be associated with the OpenSource and Linux, Microsoft war machine is all over Linux these days. There seems still that one thing they can not understand. Yes they can demolish Linux (OpenSource) based companies (what’s left whatever) but they can not make Linux disappear. Linux is not a company and doesn’t depend on corporate financing, Linux is volunteer work and passion, you can’t fight that :) )), in fact I have the feeling that they will grow our numbers :) ).

What amazed me this morning that I found an article about Linux in an magazine. Then I shaw the date August 1999. Which magazine have now the guts to write about Linux, even the truth ? Still I learned one amazing thing from it, Jon Hall, the executive director of Linux International (an organization which promotes Linux) is an manger at Compaq !.

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Daily Rumblings

May 12th, 2001

I like it! There is at least one thing that I learned, if you really want to learn something, go to the source (of knowledge). Let the ones who live it tell you the story, not the ones who learned it.

Somehow related, I was trying to clarify a few things related to how class loaders work, and how are related to security. I lost a couple of days reading lot’s of stupid documents which left more questions the answers, till I found one document and a email, which made it all clear. The best material is always hidden.

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Posted in Java, Linux, Open Source

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Daily Rumblings

May 5th, 2001

Doc Searls: Getting past fear and fudding

Managed to procure pipe tobacco, huh, Now it’s clear that I’m dependent :( .

“It follows that if Microsoft sells goods that are aesthetically unappealing, or that don’t work very well, it does not mean that they are (respectively) philistines or half-wits. It is because Microsoft’s excellent management has figured out that they can make more money for their stockholders by releasing stuff with obvious, known imperfections than they can by making it beautiful or bug-free.” from Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning was the Command Line, worth reading it.

Started IOS (Internet & Open Source). There are to many articles I read and forget. Some of them are important and I would like to have it at hand. That is JOS (at least for now) a collection of links to story’s find revealing related to Internet and Open Source.

Hackers versus crackers, always a fascinating story. Here another one by Monta Elins at LinuxJournal.

Every programmer produces bugs. The difference between a good programmer and a not so good one is only in the amount of bugs they produced. There is also a difference at the management level, a good manager will keep the bugs in house, and unfortunately a not so good one at their clients.

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Posted in Linux, Noise, Open Source

Please don’t insult me!

May 4th, 2001

Topic of the day: Craig Mundie’s (Microsoft) speech about open source.

At the beginning I must tell you that I do believe in Karlgaard conspiration theory made public in Forbes.

I’m almost crying, we are insiders. Most of us know what is Open Source, how it works and why is good. Unfortunately business leaders, does not. Most of them are taking Bill Gates and Microsoft as some kind of oracle, and follow their suggestions blindly. It does not make any difference that Linus is right, that Newton and Einstein has done more for humanity than any company. Business is about profit not about humanity, they don’t *care* about humanity.

I guess, Open Source will continue it’s way, out of any commercial and business interest, just like it was at the beginning. I’m onlyv sorry for companies who invested in Open Source, because their effort is shadowed by Microsoft. I would like only to mention IBM and Sun for their involvement in Apache projects or Intalio which made: Castor, Open-EJB, Tyrex and many other companies.

Myself I co-founded a company just to be able to use Linux full time and do Open Source full time. If there was a moment at the beginning (1999) when I show a future for the company, now my hopes are fading away, Open Source in Business game is over.

Perens: “There are companies that see Free Software, especially GNU/Linux, as an interloper to be shut down, a competitor to be eliminated. Some of these companies have increased the rate at which they file new patents. It’s not impossible that these companies and their business partners could start going after Free Software developers, en masse, with patent infringement lawsuits. Since essentially none of us can afford to defend ourselves, most developers would be forced to cave in, withdraw their software, and stop participating in Free Software development.”

discover: “Fullerton hoped the transmitter would do what he had been told was impossible- send time-coded ultra-wideband electromagnetic pulses, rather than continuous radio waves, via the backyard antennas. Ever since a professor at the University of Arkansas told him that such pulses could not be used to transmit a clear signal from one antenna to another, Fullerton had been obsessed with proving they could. Five years later, here he was, standing in his yard under the moonless sky with a smile on his face, listening to his favorite band: “Waiting for the break of day, searching for something to say . . . “

There are two things I like about this article. First it proves that if somebody thinks something is impossible that is not necessarily true. Second the implications of the technology. Imagine a wireless home with 40 Mb/s transfer rater or an personal radio station.

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Posted in Linux, Open Source

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Daily Rumblings

March 23rd, 2001

Even if it is hard to believe, I’m still alive :) . So, time for excuses: I’ve been so busy. Of course nobody will buy that. The truth is that I’ve been busy building something, which I like to think, needed a lot of creative work and the time frame was kind of relaxed, you can’t rush creativity. It required such an effort ;) that I missed my schedule with around three months. I know that 10 minutes is not so much time to spend for this page, but my big ego would disagree with you.

So, events! Well, in November or December last year I gave an interview for the Application Development Trends magazine, and then in the same time we had a TV crew from NHK public television for some Internet related documentary. What really impressed me about the TV shooting, among the fact that they filmed around 2 day/10 hours per day for around 5 minutes of broadcast, was the kind of focus they where having. Starting every morning at 9 AM till 10 PM, no coffee breaks, no lunch break. No wander Japan is where it is (or was ?). I never got the tape with the show, so I have no clue what was that they actually broadcasted :) . And after that came the relaxation time, spending the New Year’s eve up in a very remote area of the Romanian mountains. Hope I will have the time to scan some pictures, because
the peisaje was really impressive.

I’m the kind of guy who likes gadgets. So, now I have an Compaq Armada M700, an Psion Series V and an Nokia 6210 mobile phone. In this idea now I’m mobile (TM) and perfectly interconnected, you know my notebook talks with my phone, my phone talks to my Psion, in one word everything talks with everything. But of couse one is theory and other is reality. The Nokia Data Suite is a crap piece of software, which really doesn’t matter since I don’t use Windows anymore (I don’t have to much against Microsoft, so that’s not the reason), but under Linux there is little software available and what exist is not for my devices. Bad luck. I would write them, but no time. Anyway the morale of the story: there is no such as smart devices if you don’t have the smart software.

The Open Source and Linux in Business game is over. This hurts, because I believed that this model really offers (if it’s done properly) a plus to the client. It’s true it’s hard to find a revenue model in the movement, I’m not even sure if there is one. I agree that Open Source might not be appropriated to every type of software but for some the benefices offered to both the companies and to clients is huge. What is most annoying is that I feel that not necessarily was a model which didn’t found a place in the business sphere because it lacked real value and therefore died. I have the feeling that it died because of bad conjuncture (the dot-com phenomena, and the problems with the American economy) and because of an aggressive marketing with no real value behind.

The truth is that now maybe the whole software industry might get a bit calmer. I always had the feeling that what happened lately was not OK. We are not a special industry, and the software engineers are not a separate species, who deserves special thratement. We are workers like peoples in any other field. We have to produce tools, which other people will happily use. Customers don’t care if it is JNDI, J2E, Java, C# or Net based. They are still using Cobol and 10 years old applications because of the simple fact that they work and does the job which is supposed to do. Wake up people.

And of course one game ends another one begins. The name of the new game is: Hailstorm, .Net, SOAP, and Web Services. A new madness begins. Aldo not sure about the benefits of the Hailstorm for the average user (except that if he would use real cash, his wallet would be a lot lighter :) , the new game will change a bit the Internet, which might be good. Just like the Open-Source/Linux game revitalized the movement (lot’s of new software, lot’s of new quality peoples) maybe the Internet will be a bit more after the new game.

Related to RUE, without any update since October, people begin to be more and more interested in it. Great daily activity and downloads, that’s good, the 2 year prediction seems to be true.

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Posted in Linux, Noise, Open Source, RUE

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Daily Rumblings

March 14th, 2001

Eazel, a company in which many (including myself) has put their hopes to improve Linux GUI and usability is going down. Unfortunately not many Linux companies remaining, I’m wandering when Ximian is going to close their gates.

Even if the unfortunate dot.com bang wouldn’t be associated with the OpenSource and Linux, Microsoft war machine is all over Linux these days. There seems still that one thing they can not understand. Yes they can demolish Linux (OpenSource) based companies (what’s left whatever) but they can not make Linux disappear. Linux is not a company and doesn’t depend on corporate
financing, Linux is volunteer work and passion, you can’t fight that :) )), in fact I have the feeling that they will grow our numbers :) ).

What amazed me this morning that I found an article about Linux in an magazine. Then I see the date August 1999. Which magazine have now the guts to write about Linux, even the truth ? Still I learned one amazing thing from it, Jon Hall, the executive director of Linux International (an organization which promotes Linux) is an manger at Compaq !.

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Posted in Linux, Noise, Open Source

Daily Rumblings

November 4th, 2000

Spent some time reading from Joel on Software archive, I like the guy (not to mention that I found that we have the same idea about how a software company should be, sure, he has more chances than me, not everyone had the “luck” to be a Romanian). He is simple, pragmatic, and I found the things he discuss conform my experience. Also he does not try to build a whole theory around his ideas like some do.

Still related to software management. I read a ebook about Extreme Programming. I’m in no position at this moment to critique anything related to XP (since I didn’t even finished the book), but even after I listened the interview with Ron Jeffries on technetcast, I still have trouble understanding the two programmers one machine concept.

I have some concerns with this issues:

  1. Programming is an intimate thing, and I’m not the only one who thinks this way. I have no problem with others watching my programs, but I can not work if someone is staring at me. At least not that efficient. However I do agree that reviewing is absolutely necessary. So after a portion is considered ready, somebody else look at it. Also I think that sharing implementation plans (before the coding) are good.
  2. Productivity. You will hardly find two programmers who have the same programming rhythm. If the “pair programming” might work at the beginning, in time one programmer (the one which review) wich have a more static role, will lose rhythm, become distracted, and finally his participation will end up being only physical. This is even worse, because you will consider code as reviewed.
  3. If I understood that right, the major reason for this idea is that when someone start the coding, he loses the overall aspect of the problem and concentrate on syntax, and other issues. I don’t think this is true, and I base this affirmation not only on my experience but on talks with other developers. I leave this issues on my development environment, who does auto-completion, special indentation (I notice when I forgot something), and the compiler.

For anyone who wants (dreams) about joining an open source project here is a thread from the Tomcat mailing list, in which the real big ones describe their background and what they consider as necessary.

The conclusion ? “You guys all make it sound like much less pain than I had previously thought.“. And what it takes is:”… maybe it is not as much pure expertise as it is willingness to learn and contribute to the project…”.

Open Source ! Last week, again on the Tomcat mailing list was an interesting thread on the Open Source licensing issue. I finnaly understood (exactly) what is the difference between X kind of licenses (X, BSD, APL) and GPL licenses (GPL, LGPL, …).

What is about ? To quote a kuro5hin posting “GNU’s “freedoms” taking away MY “freedoms”. Basically JBoss (GPL)included some Tomcat (APL) code. Perfectly right (the X kind of license basically says, here it is my code, do whatever you like with it). The issue started when the JBoss guy’s offered some code to Tomcat (nice gesture). The conclusion ? Not possible. Including GPL code in APL code would result in APL changing in GPL (not good).So here we are both teams are fighting the same war, but still one has to reinvent the wheel all the time, and not because peoples are against sharing code (on contrary), but because the legal problems faced by the two different licenses APL and (L)GPL. My questions is, deep inside, isn’t this just a personal war between the two leaders (RMS, ESR). This war is really not helping our cause.

With this occasion I also found a good (human understandable) article on licenses, named “The Open Source Definition”, written by Bruce Perens who also happens to be the initiator of the famous “Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution” book.

This was a big posting, sorry :-)

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Posted in Linux, Noise, Open Source, Programming

RUE 0.52

November 1st, 2000

Well, the bug fix release of RUE is out.

As usual lot’s of downloads no feedback. However now I’m not that confused about that, since I found a thread on Slashdot on this subject.

Only a few peoples who makes the download actually install the software, and even fewer whom install it give feedback or contribute. The idea is that one project needs around one to two years (I’m not sure this is true also for Java) to have contributors and peoples interested in the project.

The big problem with RUE is that I really don’t know what should it be, considering that the new standard in monitoring (and management)JMX and the way it can use SNMP and TMN as protocols, there are plenty tools to do that even open source and Java ones. The way it works now is obsolete. This would not be an issue, but the amount of time I have to spend on it is definitely small compared to other projects, so features will come in quite slow.

Anyway, I won’t give up, people have to have options where to choose from, just started to have a few ideas how to make RUE useful and unique, even if the development will go a bit slower. But first specifications, because I don’t want to start the development of the new release until I don’t make a clear set of specifications, that’s why feedback would be so important.

What else ? Tyrex, playing around, and this for multiple reasons. First to have the Tyrex sensor I promised, second doesn’t hurt to know a bit about transactions. There aren’t to many documents out there about this, but I managed to find a few I liked. In case you are interested, here are the links to the documents:

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Posted in Open Source, RUE

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